Events

Register for Living Game Worlds IV

LCC’s Digital Media Program and the GVU bring together the vanguard of digital gaming for the 4th annual Living Game Worlds symposium to be held December 1-2, 2008. Raph Koster and Chris Klaus headline this year’s conference which will showcase “InterPlay,” networked online play and the rapidly growing domains of multiplayer games and virtual worlds. Also featured will be a Pioneers panel with luminaries Richard Bartle, Brian Green, Chip Morningstar, Randy Farmer and Pavel Curtis.

Discounted Registration continues through November 24.

Obama Taps INTA's Nunn as Defense Advisor

Sam Nunn, former Georgia senator and distinguished professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, will be a key defense advisor during the Obama administration's transition to power. Obama spokeswoman, Stephanie Cutter, confirmed to the Atlanta Journal Constitution that, Former Senator Sam Nunn will serve informally as a senior defense advisor throughout the transition process. His expertise and the respect he has earned will be invaluable to ensure a smooth transition." IAC's School of International Affairs was named after Senator Nunn upon his retirement from the U.S. Senate in 1996. The School draws on Senator Nunn's integrity and insight in international affairs and it hosts the biennial Sam Nunn Policy Forum.

Read the full AJC article

Dean Sue Rosser Leads Research on How to Retain Women in Engineering

Ivan Allen Dean Sue Rosser is at the mid-point of a 3-year research initiative investigating ways to retain women and underrepresented minority students as engineering majors. In a recently published article in On Campus with Women, Dr. Rosser details the retention problem and explains how she and Georgia Tech colleagues are researching how to address it by researching curricular approaches to address it.

In her article “Keys to the Engineering Gateway: Using Creative Technology to Retain Women and Underrepresented Students,” Dr. Rosser writes, “In order to implement our approach in a large classroom environment with limited time and resources, we turned to computer technology. A computer-based interactive system can help students make the crucial connections between mathematical models and real-world problems. ”

Dr. Rosser is the principle investigator for the project, “InTEL: Interactive Toolkit for Engineering Learning,” which is funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) award. Her co-principal investigators from across Georgia Tech are Janet H. Murray, Graduate Director of Digital Media and Professor of Literature, Communication, and Culture; Laurence Jacobs, Associate Dean of Engineering and Professor of Civil Engineering; Wendy Newstetter, Director of Learning Sciences Research in Biomedical Engineering; and Christine Valle, lecturer in Mechanical Engineering.

“We hope,” writes Rosser, “that by incorporating new uses of computer technology, we will encourage women and underrepresented minority students to persist in engineering.”

International Plan Gives Students a Competitive Edge

Throughout October and November, the School of Modern Languages has hosted a series of information sessions for students from across campus introducing them to the International Plan (IP). Faculty, Advisors, and IP alumni emphasized how the IP experience builds global competence within the context of a student's major and a professional edge in multi-national work environments. A final introductory event will be held Wednesday, November 19, in the atrium of the Swann Building from 4:30 – 5:30pm. The focus will be on China, Japan, and Korea, but the session is open to all students interested in the IP.

More than 500 Georgia Tech students participated in IP in Fall 2007 - Summer 2008. Dr. Phil McKnight, Chair of the School of Modern Languages and member of the Executive Committee of the International Plan at Georgia Tech, emphasized the return on investment to students’ careers.

“Executives at companies are looking for people who have worked abroad and speak multiple languages. It is likely that you will earn up to 20% higher salary with this experience and it heightens your access to leadership and management tracks as a result of understanding the way things get done within other cultures.”

The program requires students to engage in a minimum of 26 weeks of international experience (work, research, or study) related to their discipline, to develop a proficiency in a second language, and to take internationally oriented coursework. Language options include German, Russian, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

IP alumni talked about the benefits of being “totally immersed” in their culture/language of choice and the professional and personal connections they developed. IP Program Director for Modern Languages, Dr. Bettina Cothran, notes that most students find the experience so enriching that they wind up staying overseas longer than the required 26 weeks.

New SPP Undergraduate Curriculum Builds Professional Competency

IAC’s School of Public Policy is bringing to fruition a significant revision of the undergraduate curriculum. Based upon ten years of data and input from faculty, alumni and undergraduates, SPP has developed a new core curriculum that is more structured and rigorous and that will sharpen the analytical emphases of the program’s core.

“Most parts of the existing curriculum were working well,” said SPP Professor Richard Barke, who led the evaluation. “That is evidenced by the success our graduates have had in entering graduate programs and the workforce. But ultimately, we saw an opportunity to build an even stronger body of knowledge and skills that would build toward a penultimate senior task force project that students would be able to perform at a level of professional competency.”

Under the new curriculum, several core courses would become electives while newer foundational courses would be added to strengthen the analytical and critical thinking skills of Public Policy majors. All BSPP majors would complete a Policy internship. A two-semester Group Policy Task Force would replace the current one-semester Senior Thesis and new prerequisite requirements in core courses would build increasing level of competence in higher –level courses. Finally, all policy majors would develop breadth and depth in particular policy realms by choosing two “clusters” consisting of three courses each from Policy electives.

Dr. Barke concluded, “These reforms are designed to capitalize on the practical problem-solving energies and talents of Georgia Tech IAC students, while maintaining a liberal arts and critical thinking perspective on the larger contexts of policy formulation and analysis.”

It is anticipated that the new curriculum will be formally endorsed by Georgia Tech’s Academic Senate at its next meeting. The changes would be implemented in Summer 2009. Students enrolled in the degree program before that date would be permitted to graduate either plan.

Obama Faces a Different Terrorist Challenge

It has been 20 years since the founding of the al-Qaeda, the most prominent and successful promulgator of terrorist attacks on western countries and the focus of the U.S. war on terror since September 11, 2001. President-Elect Obama will be dealing with the second generation of terrorists and that may require a change in strategy, said Justin Hastings, Assistant Professor in the Nunn School of International Affairs and a consultant with the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center.

“While al-Qaeda was never a monolithic entity, the original al-Qaeda leaders defined strategy and did much of the planning for their cells, so eliminating their leadership has been an effective way to weaken them,” said Hastings. “But the new generation of terrorists is inspired by al-Qaeda, rather than led by it on a day-to-day basis.”

Hastings observed that more terrorists are operating locally and independently, committing indiscriminant killings and torture (which are often considered counterproductive by al-Qaeda leadership). “This is more of a social movement,” he observed, “and that may require tactics such as reconstruction and law enforcement rather than military action.”

Hastings also pointed out that Iraq is declining in importance as a focus of trans-national terrorist activity. “Thanks in part to the Surge, a drawdown in our forces that does not serve al-Qaeda’s recruiting and propaganda interests is possible, but it must be clear to everyone that President Obama would be acting with reference to the facts on the ground in Iraq, notably al-Qaeda’s continuing losses and the maturation of the Iraqi government, rather than any domestic political imperative in the U.S.”

Of course, the larger decision will be the new administration’s posture toward terrorism - defensive or offensive. Obama will need to refocus and decide exactly what to accomplish and the best strategy for doing that. “The terrorist battleground is shifting back to Afghanistan,” concluded Dr. Hastings. “That may require a different mix of military action and diplomatic pressure than did Iraq and President Obama will have to decide where and how to handle the threat.”

Professor Hastings has written an article on the subject on November 16, 2008 for the Other Opinions page in the Atlanta Journal Constitution

Economics Club Holds Forum on Financial Crisis

Nearly 80 students, faculty and guests packed in to a forum held October 20th to discuss the impact of the nation’s economic crisis. Organized by the Economics Club, "The Credit Crisis and You" brought together economists and policy experts from the Ivan Allen College and Georgia State. Economics major, Brent Hitchcock, explained the impetus for organizing the event: "It seemed that there was a general uneasiness about the situation. A lot of people wanted to talk about the crisis and understand how it is going to affect them."

The forum centered on the government’s bailouts of Wall Street and the banking system and the possible outcome of those initiatives. IAC School of Economics Professor, Willie Belton and Dr. Zak Taylor from IAC’s Nunn School of International Affairs reviewed the fundamentals of what is occurring and offered an optimistic view of its resolution. Dr. Carter Doyle and Dr. Mikhail Melnik, both from the Department of Economics at Georgia State emphasized more empirical data. Melnik is from Russia and represented a different view of the government’s role in resolving the crisis and was more pessimistic about the future of the U.S. and global economies.

Hitchcock says the variety of panelists benefited those who knew very little about the crisis as well as those who study economics. “We may not have gotten rid of concerns through this,” Hitchcock observed, “but I think people left more informed and that helps.”

Contact the Economics Club via Facebook group GT Economics Club

Boston Weighs in on Economic Crisis

In his October 24, 2008 Op-Ed published in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, School of Economics Professor Thomas ‘Danny’ Boston wrote, "Money managers in Washington are finally getting it. By endlessly throwing all of our resources at the financial sector, we have imperiled the stability of the government and failed to stimulate the economy."

Read the Full Text

Reel China Documents Disappearing Way of Life

Qi Wang tells us that China has not had a tradition of individual documentaries. But the widespread availability of digital cameras has revealed a great yearning among its people to document everything – before it disappears. Wang, Assistant Professor, School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, is curator of the 4th Reel China Documentary Biennial film collection which debuted in October at NYU. Selections from this year’s 33 documentaries and narratives will circulate to organizations and institutes around the world.

For Wang, the project involved travelling to China to gather works that are scattered among individual filmmakers. "Given the context of sea change in China – political, economic, cultural, and geographical – the old country and urban lifestyles are shattered much as buildings are being demolished."

Wang says there is an urgency to preserve the memory of everything and, through film, express the fundamental questions that dislocated peasants and marginalized peoples are dealing with: How do people see themselves in this new China? What does it mean to be Chinese in this age of transformation and globalization? Questions of identity, gender and sex and ethnicity crop up in accompaniment with rapid modernization, urbanization, housing projects and new youth culture and so on.” An example is one of Wang’s favorite films this year, Deer Raiser in Aoluguya. The narrative focuses on the descent of the nation’s primeval forest dwellers into alcoholism and profound sadness as they are forced to abandon their traditional life.

The works Wang collects are all produced outside official government channels and cannot yet be shown there. "I think this is a very important phenomenon in terms of historical documentaries," says Wang. "The value is beyond the present. It represents a cultural memory of very diverse topics of use to scholars and friends of many disciplines."

Wang and her colleagues at Reel China are attempting to establish a physical archive of the films at Beijing University. She hopes to bring Reel China to Georgia Tech within two years.

Georgia Tech Alumni Dramatizes D-DAY For HTS Students

The story of D-Day has been recounted thousands of times through movies, books, documentaries, and memorials. Yet, Gus Giebelhaus's History, Technology and Society (HTS) students were enthralled by the story as told by Georgia Tech alumnus, Steve Hall, Industrial Management (COM) class of 1968. IAC Associate Dean John Tone, who attended the lecture, said, “The students loved it. Hall is such a powerful speaker; he really brought to life the tragedy and heroism of that day. It was quite moving to witness.”

Hall, a retired USAF Colonel, is an avid student of military history and frequently lectures on World War II topics including the experiences of women and African-Americans. For HTS, he recounted the massive amphibious assault launched June 6, 1944 by Allied Forces against German strongholds along the coastline of Normandy, France.

Particularly vivid, was his retelling of the events at Omaha Beach. There, American landing forces faced the most heavily fortified and best-trained German battalions. They were decimated within minutes and left virtually leaderless. Hall brought to life the extraordinary perseverance of small, mainly ad hoc, infantry units that coalesced during those desperate moments to complete their mission, securing the beachhead and enabling the infiltration of German coastal defenses 4 days later.

Part of Hall’s gift is his ability to make history relevant to today’s listeners. "The kinds of decisions General Omar Bradley made preparing for and executing D-Day,” said Hall, “are the same kinds of decisions we make every day in business. Never say 'History was'; always say 'History is.' "

Today, Steve Hall directs Depot Operations for L3 Communications Systems-West, a Salt Lake City firm that manufactures extremely high-tech data link communications used in such equipment as the Global Hawk and Predator war planes. He and his wife, Pam, endow a Georgia Tech scholarship each year.

While on campus, Hall also spoke before ROTC faculty and staff about the WWII Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. He will speak on campus again during IAC’s Founder’s Day event. Hall says his topic will be the marvelous story of African Americans in WW II.

Retrospective: Usselman SHOT Presidency Reaffirms GT and IAC Commitment

In December, Dr. Steve Usselman concludes a two-year term as President of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). Usselman leaves the post gratified at having fulfilled his goal to reaffirm Georgia Tech’s commitment to a field it helped pioneer.

SHOT was founded in 1958 by Professor Melvin Kranzberg, who later taught at Georgia Tech. His vision of SHOT represents an early vision of the Ivan Allen College’s unique approach to history in its concern not only with the history of technological devices and processes but also with technology in history—that is, the relationship of technology to politics, economics, science, the arts, and the organization of production.

During his presidency, Dr. Usselman, HTS Associate Professor and Georgia Tech historian, seized upon the occasion of SHOT’s 50th Anniversary to enhance the organization’s profile in three areas of particular interest to him: engineering education, technology policy, and the broader discipline of history. He cultivated a new special interest group devoted to engineering education and reached out to groups such as the American Society for Engineering Education and the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). SHOT now helps NAE assess candidates for its prestigious Draper Prize in Engineering.

Usselman also used the 50th Anniversary forum to attract high-profile scholars to the organization, while lending his own expertise to collaborative ventures intended to raise SHOT’s presence among groups such as the Society for Policy History and the Organization of American Historians (OAH)

During Usselman’s tenure in executive leadership roles, SHOT became a truly international organization with nearly a quarter of its 1500 person membership from overseas. 650 of those members attended the 50th Anniversary conference led by Usselman.

“It’s been a lot of work,” Usselman says of his SHOT presidency, “but it has been very gratifying to be afforded the opportunity to realize one’s agenda in a larger set of forums.”

New Faculty Profile – Aaron Santesso

"This is not your traditional English department," says Aaron Santesso, who joined IAC's School of Literature, Communication, and Culture (LCC) this fall as an Assistant Professor. "It's a department that is trying to anticipate what a literature department will look like 20 or 40 even 60 years from now." Santesso believes LCC may be the most progressive program in the country.

Santesso received his Ph.D. in English from Queen’s University, specializing in seventeenth and eighteenth-century literature. He taught at Yale, Wesleyan, and the University of Nevada. His first book, “A Careful Longing: The Poetics and Problems of Nostalgia,” argues that our modern understanding of nostalgia is partly the legacy of eighteenth-century ‘nostalgia poems.’

Expanding on his background, Santesso explained, “I’m from Canada where we talk about the two solitudes – the French and English cultures. I see my career as also moving between and trying to unify two solitudes - traditional poetry and modern technology.” Santesso sees the theme repeated at LCC.

“Especially here, it’s about overcoming the digital divide between work expressed on computers and that presented in traditional media, between science and the humanities.” Santesso’s current work is within that nexus: a study of the connections between literature and surveillance, which he is co-writing with David Rosen, a professor at Trinity College.

“Surveillance involves the traditional problem of how you interpret good and bad characters. Part of that is the relationship between surveillance technology and the people who utilize it. This fits with the expanding definition of literature which one finds at LCC and the kinds of things to which you can apply literary criticism. For all the technology, the people who work in that business are really readers of character. Technology provides the information, but people have to interpret the data and that reading will be shaped by the Humanities.”

Student Profile – Kristie Champlin

Georgia Tech is something of a family tradition for Public Policy (PUBP) major, Kristie Champlin. Both of her parents, her step-father and older sister are alums. Her younger sister is a freshman. Champlin came to Georgia Tech as a President's Scholar and is continuing that tradition of excellence. She maintains a 4.0 GPA and her research paper, "Our Poseterity: the Forgotten Phrase," won a Summer 2007 PURA Award. She also serves as the Institute-wide Committee Chair for SGA.

Champlin feel that public policy is a unique among sciences. “Unlike many traditional sciences, students can’t experiment in labs with fully specified variables. Studies in public policy must traverse many disciplines, such as economics, philosophy, statistics, and sociology. This complexity of study and challenge of integrating knowledge first attracted me to Public Policy, and the classes I have since taken have only added to my love of my major.”

That enthusiasm for multi-disciplinary study is reflected in one of Champlin’s favorite class experiences, the HTS 2803 course, Engaging English Avenue, which works with the low-income neighborhood adjacent to Georgia Tech. She helped design and implement a free educational program to teach teenagers job market skills. “Not only did I learn about the history of Atlanta, neighborhood development, and the policies involved,” said Champlin. “I learned that I can make a difference.”

Champlin values the unique liberal arts experience that IAC offers to students. “We gain a technical background that enhances the critical thinking skills that are traditionally associated with liberal arts majors. This is something many other schools do not have, and I think it gives us a leg up on other liberal arts graduates.”

After obtaining her PUBP degree, Champlin’s goal is to obtain a law degree from Harvard. After practicing law for several years, she hopes to realize her dream career in public service.